Writing history

Ross Woods, 2024

The process for writing a history for a dissertation or thesis is similar to any other kind of research. You need a suitable topic, problem, and research question. To write an original history, you will need to work with original sources as much as possible:

• If the period in quite recent, your data might mainly be on interviews, although any written sources might also be helpful.
• If the period is relatively recent, the sources might be old letters, newspaper clippings, minutes of meetings, books, records of births, deaths and marriages, and photographs.
• To write a history of something more ancient, you will use old manuscripts, inscriptions, linguist's reports, articles in comparative linguistics, archeological reports, and documents written by ancient historians.

You can expect that there is already a literature on topics related to yours. This will give you not only a context but also materials for a literature review.

Purposes

While it looks quite simple, the purposes of historical study are not quite so obvious.

1. The question of What happened? is only technical history. It does not address meaning.
2. The question of Why did something happen? is a lot more useful. To ask “Why is it so?” is often to ask an historical question.
3. The question of “Who are we?” is to seek and establish an identity and promote loyalty to that identity. Being very useful, it also ignores inconvenient truths that contrast which the desired identity.
4. The purpose might be to learn from history. However, this is a value-laden concept. It might be a good consequence, but it is improper to impute those purposes into events of the past.
5. The purpose might be to understand how people saw the themselves and their world. This is lauditory, even though it carries a hint of post-modern subjectivism.

Questions to ask of history

1. What kinds of people write history?
2. Would history be different if different kinds of people wrote it?
3. Could previous writers have asked different questions?
4. What did they omit or de-emphasize? Why?
5. What did they emphasize? Why?
6. Could they have selected different source material for their work?
7. Could they have taken other perspectives?
8. Did they make any mistakes?
9. Could they have interpreted the “facts” in different ways?
10. Could they have presented something very different if they had been writing for a different audience?

Oral history

In many cases, you want to find out their "lived experience" not just a set of facts of what happened.

Most of the work is conducting interviews that draw out facts as well as people's perceptions and interpretations. The principles are generally the same as conducting interviews for other purposes. You then need to transcribe the interviews and the collate them into a sensible story.

You might find that different versions from different people are inconsistent. You might not be able to get some interviews and some might be too brief to be helpful. Some will be limited and all of them will probably be biased in some way. Either way, that is your “data.” Don't presume that people are liars, but try to figure out what is going on and why. If you find that different people have inconsistent recollections or perpectives, treat it as an opportunity to explore the reasons. It will make your work more interesting.

Your topic, problem, and research question will help you identify when you have enough data, that is, when you have done enough interviews.

Your work will probably be assessed based on how transparent you are. That is, are you reflecting your informants and what happened, or are you creating your own view and inserting it into the narrative?

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